Friday, March 30, 2018

Ryan Eckes, General Motors

we’re in a greyhound station in baltimore w/ an
hour to kill, staring at the tv. cnn is in love w/ the bombing of the boston
marathon, and cnn is in love w/ 165,000 new jobs, 165,000 new jobs, 165,000 new
jobs. they zoom in to their analyst who’s been staring at the mayor’s face. i
can see the mayor’s tears, he says, the mayor means it. he’ll make a wonderful
ronald reagan some day, just as the last four presidents, just as the president
today who picks up your phone—anybody there? anybody says “my dumb life” but in
the station and on the bus nothing rings and nobody means a thing, so we’re a
tribe. it’s communism, calm as a yawn til the next city, where we’ll be sucked
out and dispersed by vacuums of identity. finally we board. the man next to me
asks if i can watch his bag. sure i can. (“chase scenes”)

I was writing poems that blur easy distinctions
between “public” and “private” realms and trying to undermine the U.S. myth of
rugged individualism.

Mythmaking
is powerful, and the machinery that continues, relentlessly, to enforce the
American mythology is quite a thing to take on. Constructed in three sections
of extended prose sequences—“chase scenes,” “spurs” and “strikes”—the poems are
composed through a working-class lens, writing prose poems engaged with both
formal experiment and social engagement, blending research and personal
knowledge of the hardscrabble industry of Philadelphia. While reminiscent of
works by contemporary Vancouver poets such as Stephen Collis, Christine Leclerc
and Jeff Derksen, it’s as though Eckes is actually channeling the late Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley [see my obituary for him here], writing his
Philadelphia in a similar way to how Culley wrote out his “Hammertown”: writing
industry, personal history and social commentary, much of it critical. As he
writes as part of the longer prose-poem “Northeast spur”:

To reduce the number of accidents, the
Philadelphia Parking Authority started a “Red Light Camera Program” that issues
$100-tickets for blowing a red light. The program has resulted in huge profits
for a private camera company in Arizona. It has not made the city safer.

The American solution to a public problem,
created by private industry, is usually to find a new way to steal from the
public. Robbing your neighbor, in other words, is an American tradition, and it
thrives in Northeast Philly, where people live as if their neighbors do not
really exist. Believing in the American dream is a way to deny your own
existence.

While
General Motors might be a logical extension
of considerations present in his first two poetry collections—Old News (Furniture Press, 2011) and Valu-Plus (Furniture Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]—there is something that coheres in this collection that
wasn’t present before, marking a critical seriousness and lyric expansiveness
that is far stronger than simply the sum of its parts. It is as though
everything he’d been working on previously has come into an incredibly sharp
focus. Further in his Touch the Donkey
interview, Eckes writes:

I’ve always liked the idea of a book as a
book—as all one piece—rather than a “collection” of standalone poems. I think
of poems in relation to other poems, and in relation to non-poetic material.
This is because of Philly, too. Advanced
Elvis Course by CAConrad, for example, will change how you think. And
becoming a poet in Philly in the 2000s, in the post-9/11 era, changed how I
think. It radicalized me for sure. I learned far more about history and
politics from hanging out with poets in bars than I ever did in school. That is
not an exaggeration. And I think it’s because of knowing poets like CAConrad
and Frank Sherlock that I so often go back to influences from the 60s-70s-80s—Amiri
Baraka, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Ammiel Alcalay, and so on.